


Flip Side

by Allekha



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Admiration, Ficlet, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:14:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26521222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/pseuds/Allekha
Summary: Five times Yuuri watched Victor's flip jump for inspiration, and one time Victor watched his.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Flip Side

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: 5+1 things format

1\. Yuuri watches his tapes of Victor endlessly, until his dad jokes that he will wear them out. He figures out where to download videos of Victor and watches them, too. He likes everything about Victor and about Victor's skating, his lovely choreography and his flexible spins and his springy, clean jumps.  
  
Victor's axel is the prettiest of all his jumps, and it's hard to pick a favorite from the rest because they're all good, but there's something about his flip, too. Yuuri hasn't landed a triple flip yet, not like Victor. When he practices it with his coach, he imagines Victor's jump, the way he takes off for it and the way he goes up into the air and the way he rotates, tight and controlled, and he tries to be that image in his imagination.  
  
2\. It's been a bad day at practice. Yuuri tries to cheer himself up by settling himself with his laptop in the corner of a hallway and watching Victor. It kind of works. Eventually, his coach comes to find him – he has a new coach now, in a new city, a better place to train than Hasetsu – and she sits quietly next to him and watches as well.  
  
He can't help but rewind the slow-mo of Victor's last jump, a triple flip. After they watch it together a few times, his coach says, "That's a very good jump to use as a model. Do you want to work on yours tomorrow?"  
  
Yuuri's triple flip exists now; it is not like Victor's, one of the many ways Yuuri is not like Victor. It's slow and inconsistent and muscled, not effortless and light. He nods, wanting to improve so badly his whole chest aches.  
  
3\. Victor tells an interviewer that he wants to be first to land a quad flip. Yuuri believes him. If anyone can do it, it's Victor. If anyone can do anything, it's Victor.  
  
Yuuri's triple flip has stabilized. He doesn't need to think of Victor every time he does it, the muscle memory building in his frame, and it's not that ugly anymore. It's kind of his favorite toe jump now, and not just because it's Victor's favorite toe jump, either. Watching Victor do a perfect triple flip across his screen in bed one night, Yuuri even lets himself think, just for a moment, that maybe _he_ could be the one to....  
  
4\. Yuuri cries the first time Victor lands the quad flip. Phichit, sitting next to him on the couch to watch Skate Canada together, smiles and doesn't make fun of him.  
  
After the competition ends, instead of sleeping or staying up playing video games to get rid of his restless energy, Yuuri re-watches the quad flip, in real time and in slow-mo and from fancams, every angle he can find. The next day he shows up at the rink with itchy eyes and still too much energy, and finds the courage to ask Celestino to start training it.  
  
5\. Never in his life has Yuuri felt so miserable. Failure in front of Victor, failure at home, failure at practice. He burrows under his blankets one night and watches Victor's Nationals programs – he can't stomach watching the GPF recordings – several times in a row. Victor has a better quad sal and he has a quad lutz that Yuuri has never even trained and he has the flip that Yuuri's been dreaming of for years. It probably shouldn't help.  
  
In the morning, he asks one of the coaches at the rink to hold the harness for him so he can work on his quad flip. There's nothing better to do with nothing left in the season for him.  
  
1\. Yuuri doesn't think about whether it's a good idea or not; he hopes someone is recording Victor's face as he shifts his weight onto the wrong foot and turns, picks, lifts, flies – falls, but it's the closest he's felt to victory in ages, and he can't wait to see how much Victor liked that surprise.


End file.
